The No Laying Up podcast crew sat down to do what Brian Rolapp's 100-day media tour has so far avoided: actually drop a future PGA Tour schedule into a spreadsheet, week by week, under the public constraints the new CEO has set out. The result, an episode the hosts said had been "hanging over my head for the last 10 days," landed somewhere between a roadmap and a reality check on what the post-LIV PGA Tour will look like.
The exercise focused on 2028, the first season far enough out for substantive structural change after a 2027 schedule the hosts assume will be largely locked. Rolapp's January and March press conferences set the targets: 120-man fields with cuts at signature events, somewhere between 21 and 26 "track one" events, a full split into a top tier and a development tier, and a pledge to evaluate markets including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC and Boston for new event homes.
"It was very hard not to walk away and be like, hell yeah, sign me up," one host said of the original Rolapp pitch. "And then it was like, here's a blank spreadsheet. Why don't you build what you think this is going to look like in the new world?"
Once the spreadsheet opened, that confidence faded. The hosts argued that the Tour's competitive calendar runs only 31 to 32 weeks from late January to early September, leaving very little daylight for 26 mandatory top-tier events without restoring the opposite-field format Rolapp publicly wants to retire. "How are we not getting right back to opposite-field events and two events on the same week?" one host asked. "It's just it's a lot to squeeze into a much smaller window than I realised."
The 2028 calendar carries unique mathematical problems even before adding new events. The Olympics return to Riviera Country Club, which the hosts had been targeting as a possible playoff venue under the new system. "Twenty-eight is a mess because of the Olympics," they said. "You got the Open going back to August, bumping back to August, which means shorter days. And then you've got twice at Riviera that year because the Olympics is at Riviera. So you can't really do a playoff event at Riviera like we've wanted to do."
Cadillac, the Tour's headline March event in 2026 and 2027, also "keeps tripping us up" in 2028 because of the cascading effect of moving the PGA Championship. Pushing the season's second major back into August, where the PGA of America historically sits and where it has reserved a window in its agreement with the PGA Tour, would solve a chunk of the problem — but the hosts noted the future PGA Championship venues already announced, in Texas and Oklahoma, are not realistically playable in August heat. "Maybe we're taking the PGA Championship to another country," one suggested only half-jokingly.
The Korn Ferry Tour was the other casualty of an honest 2028 build. Rolapp has sketched a single fluid PGA Tour with promotion and relegation between two tiers, but No Laying Up concluded the only way to make the math work is to absorb most of the current Korn Ferry Tour into the second tier. "You essentially have to absorb the Korn Ferry Tour into the tier two stuff," one host said, while warning that without integrating the DP World Tour and the silly-season events, the second tier still ends up too thin for the 21-to-26-event ambition.
The crew was equally sceptical of Rolapp's "scarcity" framing. The CEO has said scarcity is not about the number of events but about making each one matter. The hosts countered that you cannot promise top players will play 21 to 26 mandatory top-tier events, then promise scarcity, then promise a parallel second tier — at least not without admitting that some weeks will need an opposite-field event to keep the membership working.
"I really am struggling to see how all of these things can be true," one host said.
The schedule the team eventually built keeps the Tour close to its current footprint, with Torrey Pines opening in late January as the marquee West Coast venue and the season closing in early September. "If you don't think we're doing this in good faith, you think we wanted to put Torrey Pines first? No. Spoiler alert. No, we did not want to," they said. "But man, do I think that's a good event for the PGA Tour and a good event for broadcasters and a good event for golf fans. Yes, I do."
The bigger concession was tonal. After two years of "wait till 2025… wait till 2027… wait till 2028," the hosts' working assumption now is that the 2028 calendar will move only as far as the Olympics, contracts and existing PGA of America windows let it move — and that bigger structural change probably has to wait until 2032, when several long-term venue contracts expire.
"By the time we get to 2032, some of these contracts run out," they said. "But that's an Olympic year. Down in Adelaide. Or in Brisbane."
The takeaway for fans waiting on a wholesale rebuild is sobering. Rolapp's most confident, most NFL-flavoured promise — that the Tour will not be unnecessarily bound by tradition — runs into a different set of constraints once the spreadsheet opens, and No Laying Up's best-effort 2028 looks more like an evolution than the revolution the CEO's media run has hinted at.
---
*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/no-laying-up-2028-pga-tour-schedule-drafting-exercise-rolapp-track-one-events). Visit for full coverage.*
